RSK still works via inexorable tide(modified, but it works), but FS+SS definitely doesn't work ..... actually, almost none of the layers work without color ... hmmm, guess i got a lot of work to do ... (sigh) ....
@Stakfish: Okay, I've been analyzing the gigastage deck, and I've encountered a problem. We are supposed to use copies of Smite the Monstrous to rebuild our hyperstage after a megastage transition. A hyperstage is supposed to be Metallurgeon stages separated by hyperstage transitions. But, the Smite the Monstrous triggers are all next to each other on the stack. After we use Smite the Monstrous to bounce, say, Goblin Dark-Dwellers, we need to replay it to somehow put a Razorfin Abolisher token on the battlefield. This means we need to play GDD to cast Rebuild. But then, that kills all the Metallurgeon tokens, so we have nothing to build up a stack with. Nor can we get Vedalken Orrery back, so that we can actually create a Razorfin Abolisher token copy. Do you see any way to make this work?
If not, I guess we can add an Into Thin Air into the deck. In that case, a Smite the Monstrous deck has no advantage over a Brace for Impact one in terms of card efficiency.
Long time lurker, just wanted to chime in and say that this is one of my favourite topics in all of MtG, and I am totally rooting for the f_w^4 deck to get completed and written up someday. I have a good intuition for how big numbers and all the iteration/recursion/fast growing hierarchy stuff works work, having coded a number library that handles numbers up to 10^^1.8e308 ( https://github.com/Patashu/break_eternity.js ) recently, and having re-read the explanation for how the gigastage deck works with my new knowledge behind me, it clicked a lot quicker than it did any of the previous times. Good luck to all y'all!
Thanks for the encouragement, Patashu0! I've also been intereted in large numbers for quite a while; among other things, I've posted articles explaining some superstrong ordinal collapsing functions (see the "Ordinal Notations I-VI" entries at the Googology Wiki) that can be used to define some humongous numbers.
We do have some decks that *may* be working, (except for an issue I've found recently, that has a fix) but we really need to analyze them carefully to make sure that they do work. I definitely need Stakfish to look over them carefully as well, so perhaps when he is more available, we can move this forward.
Right now, I am also working on the writeup of the megastage (w^3) deck. It may become obselete, but since we're not sure when that will happen, I think it's a good idea to write up the older deck. The deck that I am using is:
The only changes from over a year ago is that Swarm Intelligence is replaced with the stronger Thousand-Year Storm. Thousand-Year Storm removes the need to use Vile Redeemer to repopulate our board after a board wipe, so we can use that spot to add a layer at the end. Floating-Dream Zubera seems like the best choice, taking the final damage to about f_{w^3 + w13 + 5}(122).
Edit: Okay, I realize why I didn't use this sequence before; the Possessed creatures are four CMC, so we can destroy them with Engineered Explosives to make token copies. It would still be really nice to be able to remove Mimic Vat from the Soul Foundry deck, but I still don't know how to get copies of enchantments otherwise.
Anyway, it's back to our six-stage ending sequence.
Whenever you cast a permanent spell with a mana cost that contains (X), double the value of X.
Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell or activate an ability, if that spell's mana cost or that ability's activation cost contains (X), copy that spell or ability. You may choose new targets for the copy.
Is this kind of effect useful, or is it too orthogonal to Doubling Season?
Hey, all. I've been out of this challenge for a few months (going to be catching up soon), but it looks like MtgSalvation is going to shut down in July. We're going to have to move this discussion if we want to continue, which I think we should, since apparently in my absence Deedlit's found a stage in standard and we're already back to a six-stage sequence.
I have a lot of server power at my disposal, and I'd be willing to look into setting up a forum locally for this, but failing that, does anyone have other ideas? I think it's important that our discussions remain public, so anyone can theoretically join at any time.
Thanks for the heads up Stakfish! I was totally oblivious.
Setting up a personal forum would be great, but I like the idea of having this discussion where it would could be possibly read by many people, so that there is the potential of attracting new blood to the challenge. What is the next biggest MtG forum? The only other one I've looked at is Tapped Out.
Also, I think it is a good idea to share contact information with each other.
(I would say that FortyTwo deserves the majority of the credit for the current stage - while I did suggest the idea of using Cleansing Nova for our two alternating spells, he is the one who worked out the intricacies of the combo.)
@Patashu0: Unbound Flourishing looks interesting, although I don't see immediately how it would help with our current deck. Stakfish's version is in need of a spell copier that would copy something that could restore our progress, while not being able to copy something that we need to be countered. But, something that copies X spells doesn't seem to be what we need, since in our gigastage we can only cast instant/sorceries without paying for their mana cost.
For the record, Salvation is being closed by ownership, but most of the active staff here are about assuring everyone they have a replacement of roughly the same format in the works that will be live before Salvation is dead.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
Thanks Deedlit, Cleansing Nova+Excavation Elephant was the light-bulb moment for me. (and the stage was actually infinite for a long time before I realized we can just cut one of the lockets.) And there was no way I would've found it without all the previous explanations of how stages work in this thread. I am surprised that we managed to beat last standard's ridiculousness (Thousand-Year Storm is so good).
As for moving this discussion I agree that it needs to be public. Ideally somewhere easy for others interested in this topic to find.
Modern Horizons looks interesting, certainly a lot of powerful cards, I wonder if snow mana can be used as another 'color', were there any snow creatures that could only target snow creatures? (there is, Ohran yeti, though I think 4 cmc is a problem...)
It kind of makes me curious about the modern version of this challenge. Maybe after I'm done with standard...
You're welcome FortyTwo! It's always great to have another person join in.
Thanks, tstorm823. So I suppose we can just continue in the forum that replaces this one. (unless people know of another forum that they would like to move to?)
There seems to be a problem with using Iname as One as the creature that fetches Apothecary Geist. It seems to be okay in the megastage transition, since although we can keep bouncing Iname as One, we can only bring back Apothecary Geist once, and then it is stuck on the battlefield. But in the gigastage transition, we also remove Apothecary Geist from the battlefield, so we can bring it back with Iname as One bouncings there as well. So we can gain three life in the gigastage transition, which is no good.
I suppose we just go back to the old way of doing things, bringing Apothecary Geist back when something dies. Iname, Life Aspect should work. Now though we need a way to return it after it gets destroyed. We can either add another Iname, Life Aspect, or add something like Goryo's Vengeance to bring it back.
I'm going to share my modest solo attempt at this challenge here.
My purpose was a little different. The original purpose of the deck was to create as many 'things' as possible, with the restriction that there is no way for the deck to create an infinite number of things. Permanents, spells, lifepoints, counters, mana, I don't care what the things are. I just want more of them. I WANT ALL OF THE THINGS.
(The things ended up being permanents, so you can easily turn my attempt into a regular damage challenge by giving everything haste).
Deck Build
The focus of the deck is to use Thousand-Year Storm and Anointed Procession, combined with instants and sorceries that create token copies of permanents (namely Clone Legion), to create an incomprehensively vast number of tokens. Starfield of Nyx is used to turn all my enchantments into creatures, so I can copy them with Clone Legion. Omniscience is used to allow me to cast spells from my hand for free. Leyline of Anticipation is used to let me cast sorceries at instant speed.
Layering Up
Multiple resolutions of Clone Legion with Thousand-Year Storm and Anointed Procession on the battlefield act as a power tower.
If we resolve Clone Legion X times, we end up with over 2^^X copies of the two enchanements on the battlefield.
Multiple casts of Clone Legion add another layer.
If we cast Clone Legion X times, we end up with over 2^^^X copies of the two enchanements on the battlefield.
If we find that spell that, each time it resolves, lets us cast Clone Legion again, we add another layer, reaching 2^^^^X where X is the number of times we cast that spell. This also increases our cast count in a meaningful way, which combos nicely with Thousand-Year Storm.
If we find a spell that, each time it resolves, lets us cast the above spell again, we add yet another layer. The challenge was to find how many layers I could create in this way without going infinite.
Other Cards We'll Need
G1: a spell that returns untargeted spells from the graveyard to hand, without exiling itself.
The untargeted part is important: this is the spell I use to cast Clone Legion each time it resolves. If the spell returned targeted cards from graveyard to hand, all the copies on the stack would fizzle after I resolved the first.
We can only have one of these. G1 + G1 is an illegal combo, as they just keep returning each other from the graveyard.
Since I can only have one in the deck, I chose Make a Wish.
G2: a spell that returns untargeted spells from the graveyard to hand, then exiles itself.
Since the deck has no way to retrieve cards from exile, we can have as many of them in our hand as we like. G1 + G2 is perfectly legal.
This is the strongest part of the combo so we want as many of them as possible.
The only cards I could find that worked for this are Bond of Insight, Ill-Gotten Gains, Praetor's Counsel.
D1: a spell that copies another spell on the stack.
G1 + D1 + D1 is an illegal combo, as if G1 is on the stack then the two D1 spells can act as a G1 spell and keep returning each other.
G1 + D1 is legal though; if G1 is in the graveyard and D1 is in our hand, we have no way of returning G1 to hand.
Since we can only have one, I chose Twincast.
Thousand-Year Storm puts an additional 4 copies of Beck//Call on the stack, giving us 20 1/1 birdies which Anointed Procession doubles to 40.
Each birdy allows us to draw a card, 5 times, so we can draw UP TO 200 cards, putting our entire library into out hand without milling out.
We have all our enchantments on the battlefield, we have 5 instant/sorceries cast so far this turn, and we've got a lot of birdies.
So between each copy of Make a Wish, we return and bring back Twincast, which we cast, targetting Make a Wish.
With the resolution of each copy of Twincast, we cast and return to hand both of our Clone Legion cards. This adds a new layer bringing us to 2^^^^^X.
With both our single copy of Make a Wish and our single copy of Twincast on the stack, there's nothing in the graveyard for them to return that would return cards from the graveyard to hand, which prevents the combo from going infinite.
The fact that the number of spells we've cast thus far is now basically X, where X is the number of copies of our enchantments on the battlefield, means that when we cast a new instant or sorcery, Thousand-Year Storm gives us X^2 copies rather than n*X, where n is a reasonable integer.
I haven't properly factored this into my math but I don't think it gives me another arrow. Thousand-Year Storm may as well be Swarm Intelligence for the purposes of my final approximation.
Between the resolution of each copy of Praetor's Counsel, we perform the entirety of step 2. again, adding another arrow and bringing us to 2^^^^^^X copies of all of our enchantments, and more 1/1 birdies than you could shake a stick at, even if you had a lot of time and a very sturdy stick.
My original plan was to amass this army, pass the turn, and then lose during my draw step because my library is empty.
If you want to deal damage instead, Heoric Reinforcements would finish things off nicely.
And that's as far as I got. There's still 45 cards in the deck unaccounted for.
More copies of Twincast or Make a Wish are illegal.
More copies of Clone Legion won't increase the final estimate by a meaningful amount.
More copies of Praetor's Counsel, Bond of Insight or Ill-Gotten Gains will increase the X in 2^^^^^^X, but won't add another arrow.
Vermorax, thanks for sharing and making a nice writeup!
Make a Wish and Twincast go infinite. With at least one Make a Wish on the stack, we can cast Twincast, having all the copies copy Make a Wish. The copies of Twincast can fetch whatever, then when we resolve the original, it makes a copy of Make a Wish, then goes to the graveyard. Then we resolve the Make a Wish copy, and we can fetch Twincast with it, and cast it again.
Without Twincast, it looks like:
Each casting of Clone Legion takes X to more than 2^^X
Each casting of Make a Wish takes X to more than 2^^^X
Each casting of a self-exiling fetch card takes X to more than 2^^^^X
So with X self-exiling fetch cards, we produce more than 2^^^^^(X+2) birds in the end.
Ah, that's disappointing. I'd thought I'd found and removed all the infinites.
So Twincast doesn't actually become the spell it targets, it makes a single copy of the spell it targets and then goes to the graveyard before that copy resolves. Hadn't realised that, ah well.
Okay, so the Standard deck seems to be progressing along well, while the Vintage deck has stalled for a little while. Anyway, I figured now would be a good time to start thinking about creating a Modern deck.
Then, we come to what appears to be the most damaging loss: both Psychic Battle and Grip of Chaos are gone. So the normal way of processing our Vintage stage is no longer available. The best thing I can think of is to use Rings of Brighthearth in their place. This means that we can't use Mimic Vat for stages, since we could use Rings of Brighthearth on it and get multiple creature tokens per activation. So no more creature stages, back to mana stages.
Now, the champion of the mana stages previously was Chrome Mox - but it's banned in Modern! Oh well.
So, we can start perhaps by going all the way back to the very early days of our stage decks, using creatures that can discarded to create mana. These include landcyclers, the Spirit Guides, and Skirge Familiar. Some of the landcyclers are gone, as are Elvish Spirit Guide and Skirge Familliar. So it might be tough to get a full 6/7 mana stages. (and a life stage maybe?)
Of course, we could try to create a stage some other way, perhaps using the ideas from the recent Standard decks.
The other thing to consider about modern is its much harder to go off turn 1 without moxes, show and tell, or eureka.
Its still possible, but maybe not in as convenient of a way.
As for losing cephalid shrine, earlier versions of this deck used broken ambitions with izzet guildmage, which are both legal.
The problem with using the stages from this and last standard is it touches too many other places, though with being able to copy Thousand-Year storm the standard deck already gets much better.
This should maybe also be its own thread, similar to how standard split off.
Hi everyone—I just recently came across this thread and am utterly captivated by this problem. I think I have created a deck that deals enough damage to either approach or beat most ideas out there, but unfortunately, I don’t have the math background to be able to estimate how just how much this puppy can deal. I am reasonably certain the chain is finite…I’m really hoping someone can either work out the math for me, or if it goes infinite or doesn’t work somehow demonstrate how.
Without further ado:
“Do the Twist”
1 Black Lotus
1 Show and Tell
1 Omniscience
1 Enter the Infinite
1 Doubling Season
1 Thousand Year Storm
1 Leyline of Anticipation
1 Opalescence
1 Conspiracy
1 Precursor Golem
1 Mirror Gallery
1 Kiki Jiki, Mirror Breaker
1 Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer
4 Cackling Counterpart
4 Fated Infatuation
4 Quasiduplicate
4 Rite of Replication
4 Saheeli’s Artistry
4 Spitting Image
2 Stolen Identity
4 Twinflame
4 Time Spiral
4 Time Reversal
4 Game Plan
4 All Sun’s Dawn
1 Echo of Eons
Game Play:
Black Lotus, Show and Tell, Omniscience.
Cast Enter the Infinite, leaving a Time Spiral effect on the bottom. Play out all permanents, (Doubling Season before Precursor Golem). Choose “Golem” with Conspiracy.
Copy Thousand Year Storm with Kiki Jiki (making 2 more copies).
Now we start casting our token copy spells. Target any old Golem with a Cackling Counterpart (or any similar effect). This will trigger Precursor Golem and also trigger the creation of nine Thousand-Year Storm copies. Let one of those copies resolve (setting off the Golem chain again), stacking it such that the Counterpart targeting Doubling Season resolves first, then Kiki Jiki. When 8 Kiki-Jikis come into play (thanks Mirror Gallery!) use them all to copy Doubling Seasons before the rest of the Cackles happen. This is a lot of Doubling Seasons…just in time to make the maximum number of good stuff like more Precursor Golem and friends, Thousand-Year Storms and Brudiclads (thanks again, Mirror Gallery!). Of course, that was just one of the nine copies. When the second copy resolves, it’ll target every creature in play not just once, but for every Precursor Golem in play….and there are a lot! AgaIn we stack so that all the Doubling Seasons get copied first, then the Kiki Jikis, each time we make a boatload of Kiki Jikis we use them all to make more Doubling Seasons before we get a boatload^boatload of Kikis for the next Cackle resolution. You keep repeating this process until all of the copies and the original Cackling Counterpart have fully resolved, with one exception. The last Kiki Jiki activation should target Thousand-Year Storm, since we are about to cast another spell, and copying that spell a TON of times is worth more than one Kiki activation on a Doubling Season.
I’ll note here that cards like Clone Legion might be tempting, but they are actually far less effective in this deck than a token copy spell that targets a single creature. This is because instead of all the tokens coming into play at once, you get to stack it so that Doubling Seasons and Kiki Jikis making even more Doubling Seasons happen first. For the same reason, we will not be wanting to sink mana into a card like Twincast, since targeting more than one thing will not trigger Precursor Golem. One of the only cards in our deck that cares about mana is Rite of Replication (the only others being the few flashback spells for the last iteration through the deck only), and it isn’t worth adding mana for this card beyond Black Lotus, because like Clone Legion, getting all the tokens at once is an order of magnitude less effective than stacking with Precursor Golem. Later, we will be replaying though our deck many times, and for every 15 cycles we will be able to kick Rite of Replication 8 times from incidental Black Lotus Mana (minus the incidental mana we need right at the end for the flashback cards).
I’ve demonstrated the play pattern for casting a copy spell, and there are 30 more-or-less functionally equivalent cards to play out using the same pattern, but of course getting MANY more copies of each from the ever increasing horde of Thousand-Year Storms and the stacking power of the also ever increasing horde of Precursor Golems. Eventually, however, all good things must come to an end, and you’ll be out of copy effects.
Now it’s time to start Twisting! We start off with Echo of Eons; this will put something like a boatload^boatload^boatload of copies of said Echo onto the stack (I said I couldn’t do the actual math!). Because it will not go to the graveyard until after the last copy has resolved, Echo of Eons by itself is not infinite (with two it would be). Upon each resolution of an Echo copy we play out our whole deck (minus the cards that get exiled, which we will play later), repeating more and more loops of those 30 copy effects using the same tactics as Phase 1, using Leyline of Anticipation to cast everything with the other Echo copies still on the stack. Eventually, every Echo copy has resolved and Echo will be in our graveyard. Along the way, we should be kicking Rites of Replication when we can using the Black Lotus mana we get from each loop through the deck.
With Echo in the yard, it’s time for All Sun’s Dawn. We start with the most limiting way to buyback cards because every loop though the deck gives us exponentially more Thousand-Year Storms, so we want to wait for the best payoff on our best spells. We cast All Suns Dawn (which importantly doesn’t target, or else our original copy would fizzle and ASD would go to the graveyard instead of exile creating an infinite loop). All the copies go on the stack, and we let the first resolve, bringing back Echo of Eons, Spitting Image and Twincast. I thought about including a White and or Black card to recur—Courser’s Accord is probably the strongest--but populating a Kiki Jiki is so much weaker than the Percursor Golem shenanigans that you’re better off in the long run using the best spells for the job and getting less value out of ASD. We do our thing with the two copy spells, cast Echo, and cycle through our entire deck a bajillion more times (this time with another bajillion All Sun’s Dawn copies still waiting on the stack). Finally we get through our Echo loop and it goes back in the graveyard. Just in time for another run through with our All Sun’s Dawn…You see where this is going. This process is repeated for the other All Sun’s Dawns, and then the 12 Time Spiral Effects. It really is a mind-boggling number of entire cycles through the deck, but it does eventually come to an end when your very last such effect gets exiled and Echo goes to the graveyard one last time with nothing left to return it. Then you get one last shot to flash it back before our looping finally ends.
Finally, after all of our Time Spiral type effects have been used and we have flashed back our last Cackling Counterpart, we go to combat, and our vast army of Brudiclads will make an even vaster army of servos….which will then all become more Kiki Jiki! We will activate each Kiki except the last on Doubling Seasons, and finally the last one on Precursor Golem for the most damage possible. Swing for REALLY lethal.
As I said, I don’t have the skills to do this math, so I’m not sure how much damage this deck can deal. How did I do?
Greetings clone103, always good to see people interested in this challenge,
I'm no Deedlit11, so I'm not going to give an accurate approximation (Just at a glance it looks to be somewhere in the X->X->X range, where 6<x<42 though I'm not very confident in that answer)
The main thing holding you back from more damage is that you are putting too much focus on making a few things (Doubling seasons, TYS, Precursor golems) And while those do certainly feed into and power each other, its more efficient to chain your resources as long as possible instead of having multiple ways to do the same thing. For example, extra copies of quasiduplicate don't matter because you will be casting the first quasiduplicate many more times than however many copies you can fit in. 8X isn't very different from X for these approximations.
There are a lot of resources you aren't using, such as your own life total. To steal a card from the standard deck, one copy of Ionize would allow you to counter an Echo of Eons so it can reshuffle itself in. At the low low cost of 2 life.
Then you want to gain lots of life, well there are a bunch of ways to do that, Boon Reflection+Vampire Neonate trades one of their life points for a bunch of ours.
Now you want to force the opponent to gain life at the cost of something else... and so on...
Chaining the resources in a 1 to X exchange makes what we call layers. Old decks like the one linked in the OP were focused on making the longest chain possible, and got to over 400 of them crammed together in a 60 card deck.
Then the stage tech came along, and allowed us to make X layers. This completely obliterates any layer based strategy. (Look forward to my upcoming explanation of the stage combo in standard coming soon(tm)).
Now they have gigastages and hyperstages, and the most recent decklist is a bizarre enigma to puzzle out.
Just a note that if you add a counterspell such as Ionize the deck immediately goes infinite. Echo of Eons goes on the stack, with all the Thousand-Year Storm copies and then you counter Echo of Eons. It's now in your graveyard and the Echo copies will pick it up and put it back in the deck. This is an infinite loop.
I do think I understand what you're saying. I thought that the copy effects are so efficient that I'd just want as many of them as possible. I crammed as many of the "best possible effects" (those being the copy spells and Timetwister effects) and thought a very efficient looping mechanism would be the best path. I wish I was good enough at the math to figure out where this deck actually falls compared to the decks you describe that use more resources like life total, etc.
Edit: As Deedlit11 points out, Ionize doesn't go infinite because of the 2 damage. However, this gives us only 9 copies of the effect total to use for the whole game. Cutting a copy spell for 9 extra Echo of Eons (even with all the Thousand-Year Storm copies on each) isn't a good tradeoff, since it's one less copy spell for each of the impossibly many iterations through our deck, and one less spell cast through each iteration to fuel Thousand-Year Storms.
But I see; now we make a way to gain absurd but finite life...
So we want mana, life and other resources and exploit those. This is fun.
Hmm. But if we have ways to gain lots of life then Ionize becomes infinite again. I keep editing this!
Hi clone103! Always glad to see a new person join the challenge.
Adding Ionize doesn't go infinite, since in order to counter a spell, you need to take 2 damage, and you only have a finite amount of life. It's a good way to extend the "chain" of resources and effects that lead to big numbers.
It's true that adding more of the "best possible effects" is a good idea, but only when you run out of ideas that can lead to better possible effects. Before we got to stage combos and beyond, the challenge was all about creating as many "layers" as possible, where a layer is basically a recursion loop over the previous layer. If you can come up with something that can add a layer (like FortyTwo's idea of adding Ionize), it pretty much automatically beats adding a bunch of cards that duplicate the previous layer.
I will go over your deck and estimate the final damage in a little bit.
Edit: Okay, let's start by talking about the notation that we mainly use to describe numbers in this challenge: the Knuth arrow notation. This notation technically uses the up-arrow symbol, but we just use the caret symbol "^". (both for convenience, and also because apparently the up-arrow symbol is not allowed on this forum)
Just as multiplication is repeated addition (6*5 = 6+6+6+6+6) and exponentiation is repeated multiplication (6^5 = 6*6*6*6*6), we can continue this pattern and talk about tetration, which is repeated exponentiation:
6^^5 = 6^6^6^6^6.
Note that the operations are executed from right to left; this leads to much bigger numbers than if we executed the operations from left to right.
Then we have pentation, or triple arrows, which is repeated tetration:
6^^^5 = 6^^6^^6^^6^^6
So to compute this number, we would start by computing 6^^6, which is an exponential tower of six 6's (6^6^6^6^6^6). Then to compute 6^^6^^6, we would take the result of the last computation (6^^6) and make an exponential tower with that many 6's (so 6^6^6^6^6^...^6 with 6^^6 6's), and the result of computing that entire tower would be 6^^6^^6. We continue this process until we get to 6^^6^^6^^6^^6.
So, the process continues forever:
6^^^^5 = 6^^^6^^^6^^^6^^^6
7^^^^^6 = 7^^^^7^^^^7^^^^7^^^^7^^^^7
and so on. Each new operation a^....^b means repeating the previous operation with b copies of a. So each new operation represents an extra recursive layer over the previous operation.
Similarly, the "layers" of a magic combo refer to the stacking of recursive layers in the combo. "Layer 1" refers to some combo that performs exponentation; "Layer 2" refers to some combo that repeats Layer 1 X times, so it performs tetration; "Layer 3" refers to some combo that repeats Layer 2 X times, so it performs pentation; and so on. Not by accident, the layer numbers match up with the corresponding number of arrows; executing a Layer N combo will perform an N-arrow operation.
So, let's talk about your deck. Each time we resolve an effect that will create a token of a Doubling Season when there are X Doubling Seasons on the battlefield, we will actually create 2^X tokens. So this is a Layer 1 effect. Each time we resolve a Precursor Golem trigger of a copy spell, we create a copy of the spell for each of the X Doubling Seasons, and each one will exponentiate the number of Doubling Seasons, so we will go from X to approximately 2^2^2^...^2^X Doubling Seasons, with X 2's. This is a little more than 2^^X, so this is Layer 2. Then, each time we cast a copy spell, we will get a Precursor Golem trigger for each of the X Precursor Golem triggers in play, so the number of Doubling Seasons will go from around X to more than 2^^2^^2^^...^^2^^X Doubling Seasons, or a little more than 2^^^X Doubling Seasons. Then, when we get around to copying the Precursor Golems we will get more than 2^^^X Precursor Golems thanks to the more than 2^^^X Doubling Seasons in play. So this is Layer 3.
Of course, we will also have the effects of Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and Thousand-Year Storm. If we have X Kiki-Jikis, we can create X token creation abilities, enough to take X to 2^^X; but this is the same effect as a single Precursor Golem trigger, so the benefit of all the Kiki-Jikis is roughly equivalent to having one more Precursor Golem. Since we have a gajillion Precursor Golems, the effect of the Kiki-Jikis won't show up in our estimates.
Similarly, Thousand-Year Storm gets us a bunch of token creation abilities from a copy spell. This time, if we have around X Thousand-Year Storms, and the number of instants/sorceries cast is around X, then we will get around X^2 copies rather than X, so the Thousand-Year Storms have the effect of taking X to 2^^(X^2). This is better than 2^^X, but only by a little bit; it will certainly be worse than the effect of two Precursor Golem triggers, which will take X to 2^^(2^^X). So the effect of the Thousand-Year Storms is more than one Precursor Golem trigger but less than two; again, since we have a gajillion Precursor Golems, the effect won't show up in the estimate.
Next up, we have Echo of Eons. Each time we cast this, we get many copies from our Thousand-Year Storms; if we have more than X Thousand-Year Storms and a storm count of more than X, then we will be able to retrieve more than 7X^2 copy spells, taking X to more than 2^^^2^^^2^^^...^^^2^^^X with more than 7X^2 2's which is more than 2^^^^(7X^2), so this is Layer 4. Note that there isn't a big difference between 7X^2 and X here; if we had a different ability that only took X to 2^^^^X, getting N+1 copies of that ability would still be better than N copies of Echo of Eons, so it's not as big a difference as it might seem at first.
Finally, we have our exile spells. Each time we cast Time Reversal or something similar, we get X^2 copies thanks to the Thousand-Year Storms. So for each of these spells, we get to redraw Echo of Eons X^2 times, taking X to approximately 2^^^^^(X^2). So this is Layer 5.
Okay, now for the precise estimate. We have 26 spells that can copy creatures (Saheeli's Artistry is not as good, since it won't copy our Doubling Seasons, which is the main source of growth here). After the first copy spell, we will have more than 2^^^^3 Doubling Seasons, since 2^^^^3 = 2^^^4 = 2^^2^^4 = 2^^65536, and we can pass that; but, we will have much fewer than 2^^^^4 = 2^^^(2^^65536) Doubling Seasons, since that would require about 2^^65536 Precursor Golem triggers off a copy spell, and we only have 1 to 3. Each copy spell after the first will increase the second number by one, since it takes X to 2^^^X, and 2^^^(2^^^^N) = 2^^^^(N+1). So after 26 copy creature spells, we have between 2^^^^28 and 2^^^^29 Doubling Seasons.
We then cast Echo of Eons, which takes us to between 2^^^^2^^^^28 and 2^^^^2^^^^29 Doubling Seasons. This is between 2^^^^^4 and 2^^^^^5, and therefore between 2^^^^^^3 and 2^^^^^^4. Then, each of our 16 exile cards will increase the rightmost number by one, so we will end up between 2^^^^^^19 and 2^^^^^^20 creatures by the end.
So the final damage is between 2^^^^^^19 and 2^^^^^^20.
Saheelis artistry chooses only the second mode, so it does make doubling seasons. I doubt this changes the math much.
I don’t understand how the Kiki jikis are a rounding error. Every time we get kikis we use them to make more doubling seasons which will then impact how many golems we get. I’m sure you’re right but I can’t wrap my head around it.
Can’t thank you enough for taking the time to do this!
Ah, I misread Saheeli's Artistry. (I looked at the MTGS spoiler, which cuts off the text at the bottom.) So that will increase the early estimate from 2^^^^28 to 2^^^^32, but the final number will still be between 2^^^^^^19 and 2^^^^^^20.
One way to think about the Kiki-Jikis is that they are the equivalent of a single Precursor Golem; the Kiki-Jikis allow you to copy a bunch of creatures, and a single Precursor Golem trigger will copy the copy spell for each creature on the battlefield, so the latter is just as good. Since we are dealing with gajillions of Precursor Golems, one more isn't noticeable. Yes, the Kiki-Jikis will lead to more Precursor Golems, but so does that single Precursor Golem trigger.
Ionize and life gain do go infinite, if you can get that life gain using Echo of Eons. So it can't be an instant/sorcery that gains life, for instance; it has to be limited in some other way. (FortyTwo mentioned one possibility, using the opponent's life.)
Ok, last time I bother you Deedlit! I'm still trying to understand this Kiki Jiki thing, and so I'm going to give an example using a small number of each effect to demonstrate why I think Kiki-Jiki works far more explosively. You say all the Kiki activations are worth just one P Golem...
Suppose we have these two board states:
P Golem, P Golem, Doubling Season
vs.
P Golem, Kiki, Doubling Season
We cast a Cackling Counterpart. What happens?
Board 1: Counterpart targets each thing twice. First Cackling on Doubling Season resolves making 2 more Doubling Season. Second resolves making 8. Third resolves making 2048. Fourth resolves making 2^2059. Then we get a boatload of P Golems.
Board 2: We tap kiki Jiki making 3 Doubling Seasons. Cast Cackling Counterpart, targeting each thing only once. Doubling seasons resolve, making 8, then 2048, then 2^2059. Now we get 2^(2059+2^2059) kiki jikis. Each of those Kiki Jikis makes a a bajillion copies of Doubling Season! After all of those resolve we get a much much bigger boatload of P Golems. And the next batch will target everything way more times, including all those kikis which will again all copy DOubling seasons.
And that isn't even using the Kiki Jiki the most effectively (which would be instead copying Thousand-Year Storm first to get more copies of the Cackling effect). Copying P Golem would also be strictly better than copying Doubling Season before the Cackle. And doesn't take into account all the extra copies of everything else (most notably Thousand-Year Storm) that are going to come into play because we get so many more Doubling Seasons per Cackle with the power of Kiki Jiki. Doesn't this just take off like a rocket ship compared to not having Kiki Jiki at all, and continue to compound?
I'm just not understanding how Kiki Jiki is a rounding error in this equation. Please help!
Well if Kiki's copy ability was also radiated by the precursor golem then yeah it would be worth more, (I thought it did).
But since tapping Kiki ends up being the same exact thing as resolving another copy of a duplication effect, it gets lumped in with the number of times you cast them. There is some advantage to being able to get extra copies of exactly what is optimal next, but those get smoothed out by all the iteration.
Both go off at the same rate, kiki just gives a little extra headstart. Board 2 is roughly a Crackling Counterpart behind board 1.
As the numbers of precursor golems and TYS increase, the effect from kiki becomes less and less noticable.
For example if we had your scenario as before but instead of 1 of each of the things we had 10
20 p golems, 10 doubling seasons
vs
10 p golems 10 kikis 10 doubling seasons.
When we cast CC in board 1 we get 20 golem triggers. when we resolve the first one, we get a target on each of the 10 doubling seasons and still have 19 more
In board 2, if we use the kikis to target each of the 10 doubling seasons that's the same as just one of the Golem triggers, making copies of the 10 doubling seasons and only have 10 more golem triggers.
Now, it is worth pointing out that board 2 can still do better than board one by having the last kiki instead copy precursor golems to maximize the number of CC copies. But even so board 1 would catch up with another Quasiduplicate of its own.
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RSK still works via inexorable tide(modified, but it works), but FS+SS definitely doesn't work ..... actually, almost none of the layers work without color ... hmmm, guess i got a lot of work to do ... (sigh) ....
If not, I guess we can add an Into Thin Air into the deck. In that case, a Smite the Monstrous deck has no advantage over a Brace for Impact one in terms of card efficiency.
We do have some decks that *may* be working, (except for an issue I've found recently, that has a fix) but we really need to analyze them carefully to make sure that they do work. I definitely need Stakfish to look over them carefully as well, so perhaps when he is more available, we can move this forward.
Right now, I am also working on the writeup of the megastage (w^3) deck. It may become obselete, but since we're not sure when that will happen, I think it's a good idea to write up the older deck. The deck that I am using is:
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death's Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Cephalid Shrine
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 March of the Machines
12 Perpetual Timepiece
13 Dual Nature
14 Copy Enchantment
15 Allay
16 Su-Chi
17 Farrelite Priest
18 Metallurgeon
19 Deep Reconnaissance
20 Battle Cry
21 Rebuild
22 Spellweaver Volute
23 Mox Emerald
25 Deconstruct
26 Thousand-Year Storm
27 Worldpurge
28 Acorn Harvest
29 Acorn Harvest
30 Spellweaver Helix
31 Panharmonicon
32 Gerrard's Verdict
33 Island
34 Judge of Currents
35 Merfolk Sovereign
36 Aquatic Incursion
37 Natural Affinity
38 Goblin Gardener
39 Mad Auntie
40 Facevaulter
41 Basal Thrull
42 Thrull Champion
43 Godtoucher
44 Everglove Courier
46 Ghosthelm Courier
47 Possessed Aven
48 Centaur Archer
49 Maze Glider
50 Possessed Centaur
51 Eastern Paladin
52 Frightshroud Courier
53 Dwarven Warriors
54 Possessed Barbarian
55 Minion of Tevesh Szat
56 Goblin Bushwhacker
57 Genesis Wave
58 Floating-Dream Zubera
59 Channel
60 Black Lotus
The only changes from over a year ago is that Swarm Intelligence is replaced with the stronger Thousand-Year Storm. Thousand-Year Storm removes the need to use Vile Redeemer to repopulate our board after a board wipe, so we can use that spot to add a layer at the end. Floating-Dream Zubera seems like the best choice, taking the final damage to about f_{w^3 + w13 + 5}(122).
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer
5 Bloodbond March
6 Broken Ambitions
7 Soul Foundry
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Pull from Eternity
11 Izzet Guildmage
12 Karn, Silver Golem
13 Canal Dredger
14 Mimic Vat
15 Ray of Revelation
16 Skull of Orm
17 Mana Crypt
18 Obelisk of Bant
19 Metallurgeon
20 Battle Cry
21 Rebuild
22 Goblin Dark-Dwellers
23 Boggart Mob
24 Godtoucher
25 Wirewood Herald
26 Engineered Explosives
27 Salvaging Station
29 Acorn Harvest
30 Into Thin Air
31 Brace for Impact
32 Thousand-Year Storm
33 Child of Alara
34 Iname As One
35 Apothecary Geist
36 Goryo's Vengeance
37 Spellweaver Helix
38 Worldfire
39 Spider Spawning
40 Spider Spawning
41 Spider Spawning
42 Molderhulk
43 Divine Congregation
44 Wormfang Behemoth
45 Bayou
46 Eureka
47 Mox Emerald
49 Frightshroud Courier
50 Sisters of the Flame
51 Goblin Kites
52 Possessed Barbarian
53 Wilderness Hypnotist
54 Streambed Aquitects
55 Old Man of the Sea
56 Possessed Aven
57 Xathrid Gorgon
58 Tribal Unity
59 Consecrated Sphinx
60 Words of Wisdom
This should get us to about F_{w^4 + w7 + 4}(50) or so.
Edit: We can do a similar change to the Razorfin Abolisher deck:
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death’s Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Chalice of the Void
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 Karn, Silver Golem
12 Perpetual Timepiece
13 Allay
14 Skull of Orm
15 Mirrorworks
16 Mana Crypt
17 Obelisk of Bant
18 Metallurgeon
19 Battle Cry
20 Rebuild
21 Goblin Dark-Dwellers
22 Boggart Mob
23 Razorfin Abolisher
24 Bramblewood Paragon
25 Jade Bearer
26 Verdant Succession
27 Engineered Explosives
28 Salvaging Station
30 Acorn Harvest
31 Into Thin Air
32 Brace for Impact
33 Child of Alara
34 Apothecary Geist
35 Iname As One
36 Spellweaver Helix
37 Worldfire
38 Spider Spawning
39 Spider Spawning
40 Panharmonicon
41 Molderhulk
42 Divine Congregation
43 Wormfang Behemoth
44 Bayou
45 Eureka
46 Mox Emerald
47 Polluted Dead
48 Frightshroud Courier
50 Goblin Kites
51 Possessed Barbarian
52 Wilderness Hypnotist
53 Streambed Aquitects
54 Old Man of the Sea
55 Possessed Aven
56 Xathrid Gorgon
57 Tribal Unity
58 Thousand-Year Storm
59 Consecrated Sphinx
60 Words of Wisdom
Edit: Okay, I realize why I didn't use this sequence before; the Possessed creatures are four CMC, so we can destroy them with Engineered Explosives to make token copies. It would still be really nice to be able to remove Mimic Vat from the Soul Foundry deck, but I still don't know how to get copies of enchantments otherwise.
Anyway, it's back to our six-stage ending sequence.
https://twitter.com/magiconline/status/1131968108594384897?s=21
Unbound Flourishing
2G
Enchantment (Mythic Rare)
Whenever you cast a permanent spell with a mana cost that contains (X), double the value of X.
Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell or activate an ability, if that spell's mana cost or that ability's activation cost contains (X), copy that spell or ability. You may choose new targets for the copy.
Is this kind of effect useful, or is it too orthogonal to Doubling Season?
I have a lot of server power at my disposal, and I'd be willing to look into setting up a forum locally for this, but failing that, does anyone have other ideas? I think it's important that our discussions remain public, so anyone can theoretically join at any time.
Setting up a personal forum would be great, but I like the idea of having this discussion where it would could be possibly read by many people, so that there is the potential of attracting new blood to the challenge. What is the next biggest MtG forum? The only other one I've looked at is Tapped Out.
Also, I think it is a good idea to share contact information with each other.
(I would say that FortyTwo deserves the majority of the credit for the current stage - while I did suggest the idea of using Cleansing Nova for our two alternating spells, he is the one who worked out the intricacies of the combo.)
@Patashu0: Unbound Flourishing looks interesting, although I don't see immediately how it would help with our current deck. Stakfish's version is in need of a spell copier that would copy something that could restore our progress, while not being able to copy something that we need to be countered. But, something that copies X spells doesn't seem to be what we need, since in our gigastage we can only cast instant/sorceries without paying for their mana cost.
As for moving this discussion I agree that it needs to be public. Ideally somewhere easy for others interested in this topic to find.
Modern Horizons looks interesting, certainly a lot of powerful cards, I wonder if snow mana can be used as another 'color', were there any snow creatures that could only target snow creatures? (there is, Ohran yeti, though I think 4 cmc is a problem...)
It kind of makes me curious about the modern version of this challenge. Maybe after I'm done with standard...
Thanks, tstorm823. So I suppose we can just continue in the forum that replaces this one. (unless people know of another forum that they would like to move to?)
There seems to be a problem with using Iname as One as the creature that fetches Apothecary Geist. It seems to be okay in the megastage transition, since although we can keep bouncing Iname as One, we can only bring back Apothecary Geist once, and then it is stuck on the battlefield. But in the gigastage transition, we also remove Apothecary Geist from the battlefield, so we can bring it back with Iname as One bouncings there as well. So we can gain three life in the gigastage transition, which is no good.
I suppose we just go back to the old way of doing things, bringing Apothecary Geist back when something dies. Iname, Life Aspect should work. Now though we need a way to return it after it gets destroyed. We can either add another Iname, Life Aspect, or add something like Goryo's Vengeance to bring it back.
So we have:
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death’s Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Chalice of the Void
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 Karn, Silver Golem
12 Perpetual Timepiece
13 Phantatog
14 Skull of Orm
15 Mirrorworks
16 Mana Crypt
17 Obelisk of Bant
18 Metallurgeon
19 Battle Cry
20 Rebuild
21 Goblin Dark-Dwellers
22 Boggart Mob
23 Razorfin Abolisher
24 Bramblewood Paragon
25 Jade Bearer
26 Verdant Succession
27 Engineered Explosives
28 Salvaging Station
30 Acorn Harvest
31 Into Thin Air
32 Brace for Impact
33 Child of Alara
34 Apothecary Geist
35 Iname, Life Aspect
36 Goryo's Vengeance
37 Spellweaver Helix
38 Worldfire
39 Spider Spawning
40 Spider Spawning
41 Panharmonicon
42 Molderhulk
43 Divine Congregation
44 Wormfang Behemoth
45 Bayou
46 Eureka
47 Mox Emerald
48 Polluted Dead
49 Frightshroud Courier
51 Ghosthelm Courier
52 Devout Chaplain
53 Royal Assassin
54 Simian Spirit Guide
55 Goblin Kites
56 Old Man of the Sea
57 Xathrid Gorgon
58 Tribal Unity
59 Thousand-Year Storm
60 Words of Wisdom
We lose Consecrated Sphinx, and go down to about F_{w^4 + w6 + 3}(50).
My purpose was a little different. The original purpose of the deck was to create as many 'things' as possible, with the restriction that there is no way for the deck to create an infinite number of things. Permanents, spells, lifepoints, counters, mana, I don't care what the things are. I just want more of them. I WANT ALL OF THE THINGS.
(The things ended up being permanents, so you can easily turn my attempt into a regular damage challenge by giving everything haste).
Deck Build
The focus of the deck is to use Thousand-Year Storm and Anointed Procession, combined with instants and sorceries that create token copies of permanents (namely Clone Legion), to create an incomprehensively vast number of tokens.
Starfield of Nyx is used to turn all my enchantments into creatures, so I can copy them with Clone Legion.
Omniscience is used to allow me to cast spells from my hand for free.
Leyline of Anticipation is used to let me cast sorceries at instant speed.
Layering Up
Multiple resolutions of Clone Legion with Thousand-Year Storm and Anointed Procession on the battlefield act as a power tower.
If we resolve Clone Legion X times, we end up with over 2^^X copies of the two enchanements on the battlefield.
Multiple casts of Clone Legion add another layer.
If we cast Clone Legion X times, we end up with over 2^^^X copies of the two enchanements on the battlefield.
If we find that spell that, each time it resolves, lets us cast Clone Legion again, we add another layer, reaching 2^^^^X where X is the number of times we cast that spell. This also increases our cast count in a meaningful way, which combos nicely with Thousand-Year Storm.
If we find a spell that, each time it resolves, lets us cast the above spell again, we add yet another layer. The challenge was to find how many layers I could create in this way without going infinite.
Other Cards We'll Need
We can only have one of these. G1 + G1 is an illegal combo, as they just keep returning each other from the graveyard.
Since I can only have one in the deck, I chose Make a Wish.
This is the strongest part of the combo so we want as many of them as possible.
The only cards I could find that worked for this are Bond of Insight, Ill-Gotten Gains, Praetor's Counsel.
G1 + D1 is legal though; if G1 is in the graveyard and D1 is in our hand, we have no way of returning G1 to hand.
Since we can only have one, I chose Twincast.
Setup
Goal: To get the five enchantments (Thousand-Year Storm, Anointed Procession, Starfield of Nyx, Omniscience, Leyline of Anticipation) onto the battlefield, and draw our library.
Starting hand:
Each birdy allows us to draw a card, 5 times, so we can draw UP TO 200 cards, putting our entire library into out hand without milling out.
We're going to get more.
Combo
If we just cast Clone Legion between each copy of Make a Wish, we would add another layer, bringing us to 2^^^^X.
Instead, between each copy of Make a Wish, we're going to return both Clone Legion and Twincast.
We cast Clone Legion first and let it fully resolve. Then we cast Twincast, targetting Make a Wish.
So between each copy of Make a Wish, we return and bring back Twincast, which we cast, targetting Make a Wish.
With the resolution of each copy of Twincast, we cast and return to hand both of our Clone Legion cards. This adds a new layer bringing us to 2^^^^^X.
With both our single copy of Make a Wish and our single copy of Twincast on the stack, there's nothing in the graveyard for them to return that would return cards from the graveyard to hand, which prevents the combo from going infinite.
The fact that the number of spells we've cast thus far is now basically X, where X is the number of copies of our enchantments on the battlefield, means that when we cast a new instant or sorcery, Thousand-Year Storm gives us X^2 copies rather than n*X, where n is a reasonable integer.
I haven't properly factored this into my math but I don't think it gives me another arrow. Thousand-Year Storm may as well be Swarm Intelligence for the purposes of my final approximation.
My original plan was to amass this army, pass the turn, and then lose during my draw step because my library is empty.
If you want to deal damage instead, Heoric Reinforcements would finish things off nicely.
And that's as far as I got. There's still 45 cards in the deck unaccounted for.
More copies of Twincast or Make a Wish are illegal.
More copies of Clone Legion won't increase the final estimate by a meaningful amount.
More copies of Praetor's Counsel, Bond of Insight or Ill-Gotten Gains will increase the X in 2^^^^^^X, but won't add another arrow.
Make a Wish and Twincast go infinite. With at least one Make a Wish on the stack, we can cast Twincast, having all the copies copy Make a Wish. The copies of Twincast can fetch whatever, then when we resolve the original, it makes a copy of Make a Wish, then goes to the graveyard. Then we resolve the Make a Wish copy, and we can fetch Twincast with it, and cast it again.
Without Twincast, it looks like:
Each casting of Clone Legion takes X to more than 2^^X
Each casting of Make a Wish takes X to more than 2^^^X
Each casting of a self-exiling fetch card takes X to more than 2^^^^X
So with X self-exiling fetch cards, we produce more than 2^^^^^(X+2) birds in the end.
So Twincast doesn't actually become the spell it targets, it makes a single copy of the spell it targets and then goes to the graveyard before that copy resolves. Hadn't realised that, ah well.
The first thing that I noticed among card legalities is the absence of Opalescence. At first I thought that this would be extremely damaging, but then I realized that Starfield of Nyx could be a suitable substitite. Among other cards, Bloodbond March, Cowardice, Omniscience, and Leyline of Anticipation / Vedalken Orrery are all legal. But Cephalid Shrine is not - does anyone know a good substitute for Cephalid Shrine? Declaration of Naught and Draining Whelk are possibilities, although they require blue mana and recycling a creature respectively.
Then, we come to what appears to be the most damaging loss: both Psychic Battle and Grip of Chaos are gone. So the normal way of processing our Vintage stage is no longer available. The best thing I can think of is to use Rings of Brighthearth in their place. This means that we can't use Mimic Vat for stages, since we could use Rings of Brighthearth on it and get multiple creature tokens per activation. So no more creature stages, back to mana stages.
Now, the champion of the mana stages previously was Chrome Mox - but it's banned in Modern! Oh well.
So, we can start perhaps by going all the way back to the very early days of our stage decks, using creatures that can discarded to create mana. These include landcyclers, the Spirit Guides, and Skirge Familiar. Some of the landcyclers are gone, as are Elvish Spirit Guide and Skirge Familliar. So it might be tough to get a full 6/7 mana stages. (and a life stage maybe?)
Of course, we could try to create a stage some other way, perhaps using the ideas from the recent Standard decks.
Its still possible, but maybe not in as convenient of a way.
As for losing cephalid shrine, earlier versions of this deck used broken ambitions with izzet guildmage, which are both legal.
The problem with using the stages from this and last standard is it touches too many other places, though with being able to copy Thousand-Year storm the standard deck already gets much better.
This should maybe also be its own thread, similar to how standard split off.
Without further ado:
“Do the Twist”
1 Black Lotus
1 Show and Tell
1 Omniscience
1 Enter the Infinite
1 Doubling Season
1 Thousand Year Storm
1 Leyline of Anticipation
1 Opalescence
1 Conspiracy
1 Precursor Golem
1 Mirror Gallery
1 Kiki Jiki, Mirror Breaker
1 Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer
4 Cackling Counterpart
4 Fated Infatuation
4 Quasiduplicate
4 Rite of Replication
4 Saheeli’s Artistry
4 Spitting Image
2 Stolen Identity
4 Twinflame
4 Time Spiral
4 Time Reversal
4 Game Plan
4 All Sun’s Dawn
1 Echo of Eons
Game Play:
Black Lotus, Show and Tell, Omniscience.
Cast Enter the Infinite, leaving a Time Spiral effect on the bottom. Play out all permanents, (Doubling Season before Precursor Golem). Choose “Golem” with Conspiracy.
Copy Thousand Year Storm with Kiki Jiki (making 2 more copies).
Now we start casting our token copy spells. Target any old Golem with a Cackling Counterpart (or any similar effect). This will trigger Precursor Golem and also trigger the creation of nine Thousand-Year Storm copies. Let one of those copies resolve (setting off the Golem chain again), stacking it such that the Counterpart targeting Doubling Season resolves first, then Kiki Jiki. When 8 Kiki-Jikis come into play (thanks Mirror Gallery!) use them all to copy Doubling Seasons before the rest of the Cackles happen. This is a lot of Doubling Seasons…just in time to make the maximum number of good stuff like more Precursor Golem and friends, Thousand-Year Storms and Brudiclads (thanks again, Mirror Gallery!). Of course, that was just one of the nine copies. When the second copy resolves, it’ll target every creature in play not just once, but for every Precursor Golem in play….and there are a lot! AgaIn we stack so that all the Doubling Seasons get copied first, then the Kiki Jikis, each time we make a boatload of Kiki Jikis we use them all to make more Doubling Seasons before we get a boatload^boatload of Kikis for the next Cackle resolution. You keep repeating this process until all of the copies and the original Cackling Counterpart have fully resolved, with one exception. The last Kiki Jiki activation should target Thousand-Year Storm, since we are about to cast another spell, and copying that spell a TON of times is worth more than one Kiki activation on a Doubling Season.
I’ll note here that cards like Clone Legion might be tempting, but they are actually far less effective in this deck than a token copy spell that targets a single creature. This is because instead of all the tokens coming into play at once, you get to stack it so that Doubling Seasons and Kiki Jikis making even more Doubling Seasons happen first. For the same reason, we will not be wanting to sink mana into a card like Twincast, since targeting more than one thing will not trigger Precursor Golem. One of the only cards in our deck that cares about mana is Rite of Replication (the only others being the few flashback spells for the last iteration through the deck only), and it isn’t worth adding mana for this card beyond Black Lotus, because like Clone Legion, getting all the tokens at once is an order of magnitude less effective than stacking with Precursor Golem. Later, we will be replaying though our deck many times, and for every 15 cycles we will be able to kick Rite of Replication 8 times from incidental Black Lotus Mana (minus the incidental mana we need right at the end for the flashback cards).
I’ve demonstrated the play pattern for casting a copy spell, and there are 30 more-or-less functionally equivalent cards to play out using the same pattern, but of course getting MANY more copies of each from the ever increasing horde of Thousand-Year Storms and the stacking power of the also ever increasing horde of Precursor Golems. Eventually, however, all good things must come to an end, and you’ll be out of copy effects.
Now it’s time to start Twisting! We start off with Echo of Eons; this will put something like a boatload^boatload^boatload of copies of said Echo onto the stack (I said I couldn’t do the actual math!). Because it will not go to the graveyard until after the last copy has resolved, Echo of Eons by itself is not infinite (with two it would be). Upon each resolution of an Echo copy we play out our whole deck (minus the cards that get exiled, which we will play later), repeating more and more loops of those 30 copy effects using the same tactics as Phase 1, using Leyline of Anticipation to cast everything with the other Echo copies still on the stack. Eventually, every Echo copy has resolved and Echo will be in our graveyard. Along the way, we should be kicking Rites of Replication when we can using the Black Lotus mana we get from each loop through the deck.
With Echo in the yard, it’s time for All Sun’s Dawn. We start with the most limiting way to buyback cards because every loop though the deck gives us exponentially more Thousand-Year Storms, so we want to wait for the best payoff on our best spells. We cast All Suns Dawn (which importantly doesn’t target, or else our original copy would fizzle and ASD would go to the graveyard instead of exile creating an infinite loop). All the copies go on the stack, and we let the first resolve, bringing back Echo of Eons, Spitting Image and Twincast. I thought about including a White and or Black card to recur—Courser’s Accord is probably the strongest--but populating a Kiki Jiki is so much weaker than the Percursor Golem shenanigans that you’re better off in the long run using the best spells for the job and getting less value out of ASD. We do our thing with the two copy spells, cast Echo, and cycle through our entire deck a bajillion more times (this time with another bajillion All Sun’s Dawn copies still waiting on the stack). Finally we get through our Echo loop and it goes back in the graveyard. Just in time for another run through with our All Sun’s Dawn…You see where this is going. This process is repeated for the other All Sun’s Dawns, and then the 12 Time Spiral Effects. It really is a mind-boggling number of entire cycles through the deck, but it does eventually come to an end when your very last such effect gets exiled and Echo goes to the graveyard one last time with nothing left to return it. Then you get one last shot to flash it back before our looping finally ends.
Finally, after all of our Time Spiral type effects have been used and we have flashed back our last Cackling Counterpart, we go to combat, and our vast army of Brudiclads will make an even vaster army of servos….which will then all become more Kiki Jiki! We will activate each Kiki except the last on Doubling Seasons, and finally the last one on Precursor Golem for the most damage possible. Swing for REALLY lethal.
As I said, I don’t have the skills to do this math, so I’m not sure how much damage this deck can deal. How did I do?
I'm no Deedlit11, so I'm not going to give an accurate approximation (Just at a glance it looks to be somewhere in the X->X->X range, where 6<x<42 though I'm not very confident in that answer)
The main thing holding you back from more damage is that you are putting too much focus on making a few things (Doubling seasons, TYS, Precursor golems) And while those do certainly feed into and power each other, its more efficient to chain your resources as long as possible instead of having multiple ways to do the same thing. For example, extra copies of quasiduplicate don't matter because you will be casting the first quasiduplicate many more times than however many copies you can fit in. 8X isn't very different from X for these approximations.
There are a lot of resources you aren't using, such as your own life total. To steal a card from the standard deck, one copy of Ionize would allow you to counter an Echo of Eons so it can reshuffle itself in. At the low low cost of 2 life.
Then you want to gain lots of life, well there are a bunch of ways to do that, Boon Reflection+Vampire Neonate trades one of their life points for a bunch of ours.
Now you want to force the opponent to gain life at the cost of something else... and so on...
Chaining the resources in a 1 to X exchange makes what we call layers. Old decks like the one linked in the OP were focused on making the longest chain possible, and got to over 400 of them crammed together in a 60 card deck.
Then the stage tech came along, and allowed us to make X layers. This completely obliterates any layer based strategy. (Look forward to my upcoming explanation of the stage combo in standard coming soon(tm)).
Now they have gigastages and hyperstages, and the most recent decklist is a bizarre enigma to puzzle out.
Just a note that if you add a counterspell such as Ionize the deck immediately goes infinite. Echo of Eons goes on the stack, with all the Thousand-Year Storm copies and then you counter Echo of Eons. It's now in your graveyard and the Echo copies will pick it up and put it back in the deck. This is an infinite loop.
I do think I understand what you're saying. I thought that the copy effects are so efficient that I'd just want as many of them as possible. I crammed as many of the "best possible effects" (those being the copy spells and Timetwister effects) and thought a very efficient looping mechanism would be the best path. I wish I was good enough at the math to figure out where this deck actually falls compared to the decks you describe that use more resources like life total, etc.
Edit: As Deedlit11 points out, Ionize doesn't go infinite because of the 2 damage. However, this gives us only 9 copies of the effect total to use for the whole game. Cutting a copy spell for 9 extra Echo of Eons (even with all the Thousand-Year Storm copies on each) isn't a good tradeoff, since it's one less copy spell for each of the impossibly many iterations through our deck, and one less spell cast through each iteration to fuel Thousand-Year Storms.
But I see; now we make a way to gain absurd but finite life...
So we want mana, life and other resources and exploit those. This is fun.
Hmm. But if we have ways to gain lots of life then Ionize becomes infinite again. I keep editing this!
Adding Ionize doesn't go infinite, since in order to counter a spell, you need to take 2 damage, and you only have a finite amount of life. It's a good way to extend the "chain" of resources and effects that lead to big numbers.
It's true that adding more of the "best possible effects" is a good idea, but only when you run out of ideas that can lead to better possible effects. Before we got to stage combos and beyond, the challenge was all about creating as many "layers" as possible, where a layer is basically a recursion loop over the previous layer. If you can come up with something that can add a layer (like FortyTwo's idea of adding Ionize), it pretty much automatically beats adding a bunch of cards that duplicate the previous layer.
I will go over your deck and estimate the final damage in a little bit.
Edit: Okay, let's start by talking about the notation that we mainly use to describe numbers in this challenge: the Knuth arrow notation. This notation technically uses the up-arrow symbol, but we just use the caret symbol "^". (both for convenience, and also because apparently the up-arrow symbol is not allowed on this forum)
Just as multiplication is repeated addition (6*5 = 6+6+6+6+6) and exponentiation is repeated multiplication (6^5 = 6*6*6*6*6), we can continue this pattern and talk about tetration, which is repeated exponentiation:
6^^5 = 6^6^6^6^6.
Note that the operations are executed from right to left; this leads to much bigger numbers than if we executed the operations from left to right.
Then we have pentation, or triple arrows, which is repeated tetration:
6^^^5 = 6^^6^^6^^6^^6
So to compute this number, we would start by computing 6^^6, which is an exponential tower of six 6's (6^6^6^6^6^6). Then to compute 6^^6^^6, we would take the result of the last computation (6^^6) and make an exponential tower with that many 6's (so 6^6^6^6^6^...^6 with 6^^6 6's), and the result of computing that entire tower would be 6^^6^^6. We continue this process until we get to 6^^6^^6^^6^^6.
So, the process continues forever:
6^^^^5 = 6^^^6^^^6^^^6^^^6
7^^^^^6 = 7^^^^7^^^^7^^^^7^^^^7^^^^7
and so on. Each new operation a^....^b means repeating the previous operation with b copies of a. So each new operation represents an extra recursive layer over the previous operation.
Similarly, the "layers" of a magic combo refer to the stacking of recursive layers in the combo. "Layer 1" refers to some combo that performs exponentation; "Layer 2" refers to some combo that repeats Layer 1 X times, so it performs tetration; "Layer 3" refers to some combo that repeats Layer 2 X times, so it performs pentation; and so on. Not by accident, the layer numbers match up with the corresponding number of arrows; executing a Layer N combo will perform an N-arrow operation.
So, let's talk about your deck. Each time we resolve an effect that will create a token of a Doubling Season when there are X Doubling Seasons on the battlefield, we will actually create 2^X tokens. So this is a Layer 1 effect. Each time we resolve a Precursor Golem trigger of a copy spell, we create a copy of the spell for each of the X Doubling Seasons, and each one will exponentiate the number of Doubling Seasons, so we will go from X to approximately 2^2^2^...^2^X Doubling Seasons, with X 2's. This is a little more than 2^^X, so this is Layer 2. Then, each time we cast a copy spell, we will get a Precursor Golem trigger for each of the X Precursor Golem triggers in play, so the number of Doubling Seasons will go from around X to more than 2^^2^^2^^...^^2^^X Doubling Seasons, or a little more than 2^^^X Doubling Seasons. Then, when we get around to copying the Precursor Golems we will get more than 2^^^X Precursor Golems thanks to the more than 2^^^X Doubling Seasons in play. So this is Layer 3.
Of course, we will also have the effects of Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and Thousand-Year Storm. If we have X Kiki-Jikis, we can create X token creation abilities, enough to take X to 2^^X; but this is the same effect as a single Precursor Golem trigger, so the benefit of all the Kiki-Jikis is roughly equivalent to having one more Precursor Golem. Since we have a gajillion Precursor Golems, the effect of the Kiki-Jikis won't show up in our estimates.
Similarly, Thousand-Year Storm gets us a bunch of token creation abilities from a copy spell. This time, if we have around X Thousand-Year Storms, and the number of instants/sorceries cast is around X, then we will get around X^2 copies rather than X, so the Thousand-Year Storms have the effect of taking X to 2^^(X^2). This is better than 2^^X, but only by a little bit; it will certainly be worse than the effect of two Precursor Golem triggers, which will take X to 2^^(2^^X). So the effect of the Thousand-Year Storms is more than one Precursor Golem trigger but less than two; again, since we have a gajillion Precursor Golems, the effect won't show up in the estimate.
Next up, we have Echo of Eons. Each time we cast this, we get many copies from our Thousand-Year Storms; if we have more than X Thousand-Year Storms and a storm count of more than X, then we will be able to retrieve more than 7X^2 copy spells, taking X to more than 2^^^2^^^2^^^...^^^2^^^X with more than 7X^2 2's which is more than 2^^^^(7X^2), so this is Layer 4. Note that there isn't a big difference between 7X^2 and X here; if we had a different ability that only took X to 2^^^^X, getting N+1 copies of that ability would still be better than N copies of Echo of Eons, so it's not as big a difference as it might seem at first.
Finally, we have our exile spells. Each time we cast Time Reversal or something similar, we get X^2 copies thanks to the Thousand-Year Storms. So for each of these spells, we get to redraw Echo of Eons X^2 times, taking X to approximately 2^^^^^(X^2). So this is Layer 5.
Okay, now for the precise estimate. We have 26 spells that can copy creatures (Saheeli's Artistry is not as good, since it won't copy our Doubling Seasons, which is the main source of growth here). After the first copy spell, we will have more than 2^^^^3 Doubling Seasons, since 2^^^^3 = 2^^^4 = 2^^2^^4 = 2^^65536, and we can pass that; but, we will have much fewer than 2^^^^4 = 2^^^(2^^65536) Doubling Seasons, since that would require about 2^^65536 Precursor Golem triggers off a copy spell, and we only have 1 to 3. Each copy spell after the first will increase the second number by one, since it takes X to 2^^^X, and 2^^^(2^^^^N) = 2^^^^(N+1). So after 26 copy creature spells, we have between 2^^^^28 and 2^^^^29 Doubling Seasons.
We then cast Echo of Eons, which takes us to between 2^^^^2^^^^28 and 2^^^^2^^^^29 Doubling Seasons. This is between 2^^^^^4 and 2^^^^^5, and therefore between 2^^^^^^3 and 2^^^^^^4. Then, each of our 16 exile cards will increase the rightmost number by one, so we will end up between 2^^^^^^19 and 2^^^^^^20 creatures by the end.
So the final damage is between 2^^^^^^19 and 2^^^^^^20.
I don’t understand how the Kiki jikis are a rounding error. Every time we get kikis we use them to make more doubling seasons which will then impact how many golems we get. I’m sure you’re right but I can’t wrap my head around it.
Can’t thank you enough for taking the time to do this!
Ah, I misread Saheeli's Artistry. (I looked at the MTGS spoiler, which cuts off the text at the bottom.) So that will increase the early estimate from 2^^^^28 to 2^^^^32, but the final number will still be between 2^^^^^^19 and 2^^^^^^20.
One way to think about the Kiki-Jikis is that they are the equivalent of a single Precursor Golem; the Kiki-Jikis allow you to copy a bunch of creatures, and a single Precursor Golem trigger will copy the copy spell for each creature on the battlefield, so the latter is just as good. Since we are dealing with gajillions of Precursor Golems, one more isn't noticeable. Yes, the Kiki-Jikis will lead to more Precursor Golems, but so does that single Precursor Golem trigger.
Ionize and life gain do go infinite, if you can get that life gain using Echo of Eons. So it can't be an instant/sorcery that gains life, for instance; it has to be limited in some other way. (FortyTwo mentioned one possibility, using the opponent's life.)
Suppose we have these two board states:
P Golem, P Golem, Doubling Season
vs.
P Golem, Kiki, Doubling Season
We cast a Cackling Counterpart. What happens?
Board 1: Counterpart targets each thing twice. First Cackling on Doubling Season resolves making 2 more Doubling Season. Second resolves making 8. Third resolves making 2048. Fourth resolves making 2^2059. Then we get a boatload of P Golems.
Board 2: We tap kiki Jiki making 3 Doubling Seasons. Cast Cackling Counterpart, targeting each thing only once. Doubling seasons resolve, making 8, then 2048, then 2^2059. Now we get 2^(2059+2^2059) kiki jikis. Each of those Kiki Jikis makes a a bajillion copies of Doubling Season! After all of those resolve we get a much much bigger boatload of P Golems. And the next batch will target everything way more times, including all those kikis which will again all copy DOubling seasons.
And that isn't even using the Kiki Jiki the most effectively (which would be instead copying Thousand-Year Storm first to get more copies of the Cackling effect). Copying P Golem would also be strictly better than copying Doubling Season before the Cackle. And doesn't take into account all the extra copies of everything else (most notably Thousand-Year Storm) that are going to come into play because we get so many more Doubling Seasons per Cackle with the power of Kiki Jiki. Doesn't this just take off like a rocket ship compared to not having Kiki Jiki at all, and continue to compound?
I'm just not understanding how Kiki Jiki is a rounding error in this equation. Please help!
But since tapping Kiki ends up being the same exact thing as resolving another copy of a duplication effect, it gets lumped in with the number of times you cast them. There is some advantage to being able to get extra copies of exactly what is optimal next, but those get smoothed out by all the iteration.
Both go off at the same rate, kiki just gives a little extra headstart. Board 2 is roughly a Crackling Counterpart behind board 1.
As the numbers of precursor golems and TYS increase, the effect from kiki becomes less and less noticable.
For example if we had your scenario as before but instead of 1 of each of the things we had 10
20 p golems, 10 doubling seasons
vs
10 p golems 10 kikis 10 doubling seasons.
When we cast CC in board 1 we get 20 golem triggers. when we resolve the first one, we get a target on each of the 10 doubling seasons and still have 19 more
In board 2, if we use the kikis to target each of the 10 doubling seasons that's the same as just one of the Golem triggers, making copies of the 10 doubling seasons and only have 10 more golem triggers.
Now, it is worth pointing out that board 2 can still do better than board one by having the last kiki instead copy precursor golems to maximize the number of CC copies. But even so board 1 would catch up with another Quasiduplicate of its own.